What difference do you see between “free will” and “done of your own volition”?
The word “free” as in uncoerced. We already disagree. I’m giving up on “libertarianism” the philosophy.
Why are you suddenly giving up on it?
I don’t think he ever supported it.
Seemed like an interesting question, but wow, a hostile discussion.
I understood the core question to be, if many people buy protection from having their property rights violated, does this implicitly validate those that violate it, and does this create a perverse incentive for such violations? Another way of capturing this is to look at the amount of protection people “have” to buy as variable, and ask at what level is it a sign of something else that’s out of whack. If people had to build their houses of steel and employ security guards, is that just the normal way, or is something else broken that “needs” fixing?
I notice that implicit above is the idea that the general state of things should be a certain way, and there’s someone to blame or put the cost on, rather than each person simply making individual choices given the circumstances. From this perspective, if this were a general problem, people could collaborate to attempt to lower the crime rate so that they didn’t need steel houses. Perhaps they’d find that the providers of steel houses were in collusion with those breaking in, or in collusion with those who report crimes and having them describe things as worse than they are.
Still waiting to hear why you’re “giving up on ‘libertarianism’ the philosophy”, QuisCustodiet.
Also, I’ll ask you this: do you see any difference between threat and risk?
If someone buys an insurance/rights enforcement policy in an anarcho-capitalist society,
can the purchase really be said to be voluntary?With the policy, there is less of a chance that the buyer’s rights will be violated.
Because of this threat to his rights, he buys the policy. So isn’t that coercive?
Yes, there is an inherent threat of coercion in any society, and the potential for accidents
to happen even as a solitary person. Is paying for health insurance to guard against an
accident, even if you caused the accident, voluntary? In a perfect world with perfect knowledge
insuring against accidents wouldn’t be necessary, but neither of those conditions are true. You
seem to be saying that in order for private protection to be voluntary it would have to be
purchased in the absence of any need for protection.
Imagine our planets surface was bombarded by meteors millions of times more than it is at present and that a large threat to life on the planet was property damage,or being injured or killed by a meteor. Would meteor damage insurance be voluntary?
The fence you are erecting to qualify voluntariness is too high, in the absence of some
supernatural event some level of criminal activity and right violations by criminals is a fact of
life. Given the definitions inherent in your arguement no private right protection is not
voluntary, however neither is eating dinner because you are hungry.
Even if I accept your definitions that does nothing to change the benefits of private protection
agencies over government protection. With private protection everyone if free to choose the level
of protection they desire, or to choose risk, rather than piling onto the inherent coerciveness of
life by forcing people to purchase protection from an agency with no incentive to really protect them with no possibility of determining what is the proper level of protection. Even calling the natural threats caused by the universe “coercion” does nothing to lessen the injustice of creating more coercion.
With this logic, water bottle companies are coercive because people get thirsty. The purchase of the insurance enforcement policy is voluntary because he does not have to buy from a specific company or from any company at all, and so different companies are competing to best provide him with the goods he desires. You wouldn’t say that today’s private bodyguards are “coercing” their employers just because their employer feels threatened by other people.
Stupid stomach coercing me into finding a way to get food.
No. This was addressed earlier in the thread. I see this as one of the great unanswered questions posed to libertarians.
What is free will? Does it really exist?
At this time, I don’t know if it does. But since hunger isn’t an agent, there’s nothing a law can do to outlaw it without violating the NAP (i.e., making people feed each other or else).
My question was specifically about protection against agents who threaten to violate your rights. If there were no agent in the universe who would even consider violating any of your rights, you wouldn’t buy protection.
Imagine you are an entrepreneur. You realize that, in your neighborhood, there has been a series of break-ins. Seeing an opportunity, you hire a couple dozen trained bodyguard and map out an effective way to quickly reach different parts of your neighborhood. You design an alarm that can be easily installed into homes. Finally, after investing maybe 10,000 of your own dollars and hundreds of hours of your time, you advertise your company throughout the neighborhood.
Does everyone need to contract you? No. Does anyone need to? No. If you’ve done a bad job either setting up your security or advertising your company, or you are charging millions, it’s unlikely that anyone will contract you. If they decide not to, they are just as well off as before. If they decide to, they do it because they feel that they benefit.
Would it be fair to call you coercive? Did you force anyone to do anything? No. In fact, you spent a lot of time and money trying to improve both their lives and yours as well so you really can only be considered benificent.
No, they’d be doing it because they don’t want their houses broken into.
So no, I don’t see how it’s voluntary (i.e. not coerced).
That is a benefit.
The only way it would make sense to call it coercion is if the person offering the security is also the one breaking into people’s homes.
A is a threat
B sells a policy protecting against threats
unless A and B are a team, and A and B are a threat, then B is not a threat and a relationship with B is not coercive
B is not working with A, and B would offer the trade if A did not exist.
To apply that to another case, it wouldn’t be coercive in your view for someone to sleep with a girl who was roofied by someone else at a party, even if she never would have slept with him without having been drugged.
Discussed here: Is it required to be of sound body and mind to contract?
I think I’m just gonna be a utilitarian. It’s a lot easier to defend the benefits of more freedom and capitalism than any of this “voluntaryist” philosophy. David Friedman’s criticisms of NAP libertarians in Machinery of Freedom are formidable, particularly the ray gun/flashlight scenario and the enraged misanthropic shooter scenario.
Cab21: Excellent simplification of the core issue
QuisCustodiet: I really don’t see how this situation shows any flaw in private protection. That’s not to say there aren’t any, I’m still not 100% convinced, though I strongly lean that way. I could only see this as a criticism of private protection if the alternative were a 100% controlled society, i.e. everyone is locked in their own little rooms alone until an angel is called to let them out to use the bathroom, and you’re obviously not arguing for that.
If a car company charges extra for airbags are they coercing you? Sure we call them accidents but assume there were no accidents, that all car wrecks were the result of someone intentionally ramming other cars, would the seller of airbags be complicit in coercion? How does this differ from Private Rights enforcement?
I’d say that depends on what your definition of “free will” is. (No, I don’t mind sounding like a broken record. )
What’s your definition of “agent” anyway?
That raises the question of how anyone would (or could) ever know whether there’s any agent in the universe who’d even consider violating any of his rights. If you deem that knowledge to be impossible, then you must logically treat every agent in the universe as always being “coerced”, at which point “coercion” becomes meaningless (i.e. loses distinction, as it’s impossible to not be “coerced”).
I’ll ask you a third time: why are you giving up on “‘libertarianism’ the philosophy”?
Do you think that whatever you’re calling “the benefits of freedom and capitalism” are objective facts?